


and we just keep meeting each other like this

by muppetstiefel



Series: nothing new about this rage [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Blood, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Fire, Implied/Referenced Suicide, No one knows why, Reincarnation, Sort Of, ben just keeps coming back to life, the universe keeps resetting itself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2019-11-23 06:40:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18148430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muppetstiefel/pseuds/muppetstiefel
Summary: “The feeling of lying there sends a bolt of nerves up his spine which his body answers with a spasm. He feels an aching sense of familiarity as the monster within him curls lifelessly around his broken arm. This has happened before. He's sure of it.”in which Ben keeps dying again and again, and the universe keeps trying to set it right.





	1. still and quiet

The first time Six dies, it’s the most painful. 

He’s only five, and small for his age. A little thing, swamped in the itchy uniform of the umbrella academy, with the wonky mask that his father promised him he would grow into. He knows nothing outside of the academy, and unlike his seven who spends all her time staring out her window and five who routinely tries to sneak out when Pogo isn’t looking, he doesn’t want to.

In fact, Six likes the academy, with its rules and its uniformity. He likes that he’s expected to be quiet, because that’s all he wants to be- quiet. His siblings are loud and big and they seem to take up so much room. One and Two seem content to argue as loudly as they can, and sometimes Number Threes screeching and screaming makes Six want to cry sometimes. Because he loves the quiet, and he savours it when his body is being so loud. It seems to scream at him, pushing against the skin like it wants to get out. Six doesn’t like that. He likes the quiet.

Of course, he’d like it better if everyone else liked the quiet too. Number Seven loves it almost as much as him, and perhaps that’s why she’s his favourite. Number Four hates the quiet, and the still, and pretty much everything that Six likes. He revels in the noise, loves being the boisterous centre of attention, and his fooling around seems to make his siblings happy. Six would love to make his siblings happy, but he can’t be loud or happy like four. Because if he is, then he’s not quiet and still. And his insides might just push through the layers of skin if he stops being still and quiet.

He doesn’t talk much- not to his siblings, or to Pogo, and especially not to his father. Not that his father much likes to talk to him either. He seems to prefer one and two, but they’re just too loud for Six. He even appears to like Four sometimes, which Six just can’t understand. He’s so loud, and he never does as he’s told. Six always does as his told.

Well, he tries to. But he tries to be quiet and still more. That’s what’s important, even if it gets him in trouble.

The day it happens is exactly the same as every other day. Grace wakes him at exactly 5:34, just like always. He’s the second one to wake up after Seven, the second child on Grace’s round. He’s still rubbing sleep out of his eyes as he heads to the staircase for breakfast when Five pushes past him to get down stairs. Six jostles slightly and clutches to the rail, thinking to himself “quiet and still” until the bubbling under his skin quietens and he starts to descend the stairs one by one. He pushes against the wall each time the others past, Number One then Four then Three then Two, till the only person left is Seven, who waits for Six, step by step.

Breakfast is the same as always- quiet, just the way Six likes it. He eats his oatmeal slowly, clumsily maneuvering the spoon to his mouth so he doesn’t spill down his neatly pressed uniform. Three plays with her hair, the end dangling into her orange juice. Two and Five kick at one another across the table, shooting daggers each time their feet collide. One finishes first and spends the rest of the time glaring at them, nose scrunched up. Four is playing with Sevens sleeve, and Seven doesn’t even notice, nearly asleep in her breakfast.

And Six eats, quiet and still.

After breakfast, father tells him to meet him in his office. One furrows his brow, angry that his training seems to have been put on hold but father has already left, and it only leaves Six to blame.

“How come you get extra training?”, one starts, pushing his chair back with a screech and shoving his empty bowl into the sink, “you don’t even really have a power. You have an octopus.”

Six stares down at his hands, which he twists together uncomfortably and shrugs. It’s Four who pipes up, dropping Sevens sleeve and exclaiming, “I wish I had an octopus inside of me! Imagine how cool that would be? You could keep it as a pet!” he cups his hands and turns to Two, shoving them into his face, wriggling his fingers like tentacles. Two bats him away, scowling.

“it’s not really an octopus, one. It’s more like a tentacle monster.” Three explains as she follows One’s lead, dumping her bow into the sink.

Six sinks in his seat, hiding his face in his collar. He has a monster inside him. That’s much better than an octopus.

He takes a while on the way to his father’s office, running his hand along the cabinets and taking any opportunity to stop and inspect his surroundings. Pogo is leading him, because the house is a maze and Six would take any opportunity to claim he got ‘lost’ on his journey there. He stops mournfully at a window, watching his siblings playing in the courtyard. He wishes he could be out there with them, kicking a ball or, in the case of Four, climbing the side of the opposing building. But he can’t, because he has to spend the day in his father’s dreary office, surrounded by files and forms and things that should definitely be in a museum, not in a house with seven children.

Not that he would play anyway. His siblings don’t play quiet or still games, and he doesn’t want to tempt the ‘tentacle monster’ living inside of him.

Pogo stops outside a door, and Six frowns, looking up at the monkey.

“this isn’t dad’s office?” it comes out as a whispered question, and Six clutches tightly to the front of his shirt. Pogo answers him with nothing but silence and, sliding the heavy metal bolt across, pushes the door open with a groan to reveal a dark musty room.

A single light flickers over his father’s head. Six feels like he’s holding his breath as he steps inside, gently placing his feet in the patches of ground that aren’t wet. The door creeks shut.

Good morning, Six. I’ve been working on something special for you, and we finally got it ready for you, so I thought we’d move your training forward to today. Do you follow?”

Six nods violently, desperate to impress, to keep up with his father’s demands.

“Do you like the room, Six. It’s a place especially for you. And its soundproof, so none of your siblings get to play down here. Understand?”

He nods again, this time his face lighting up slightly. A place just for him, with no noise? It’s just what he wants.

“Good. I’ve noticed recently, number six, that your training seems to have come to a halt. You seem to be struggling to reach your full ability. I believe that your powers extend far beyond the confines of your own body, and you seem to be struggling to unlock it.”

Six’s face falls and he shifts nervously. He knows what his father’s going to ask, what he always asks. He feels sick. He rather be in the middle of one of One and Two’s superhero wrestling fights then be in this room. His skin ripples and the coil of a tentacle protrudes through his forearm.

“you understand what I’m asking of you, number six? You know that it’s not enough to control the creature inside of you. You have to let it control you.”

Six nods again, but this time his movements are more jerky.

“I’m going to watch from outside, number six. And you are going to let the creature take control, if you want to have any chance of being a part of the umbrella academy.”

Six scrunches up his fist, his heart hammering as his father backs out of the room like he’s a wild creature. He can already feel the tentacles pushing past his arteries and gathering in his stomach. He hates the sensation, the franticness that inhabits his body within the scales of the creature. He screws up his eyes, focusing on being not still and not quiet. He has to be like Four, who seems to never stop moving. To be like Three and her tantrums. He clenches his fists even tighter, fingernails embedding into his palms as a soft cry pushes past his lips.

And then, it erupts.

At first, he feels everything. The pain as the creature rips open his gut and snakes its way out, prising and pushing at the walls of the container. He feels the blood that runs down his shorts and then the wet, hot sensation as it slithers onto his bare knees. He’s not sure when he starts to cry, but it must be at some point because soon the sound of his screams fills the cage of a box. The words swirl in his head; not still, not quiet, not still, not quiet. He jumps up and down, stomps his feet against the door, unclenches and clenches his fist in his hair, pulls and pulls.

Then, he feels nothing. The tentacles are still moving, wrapping themselves around his frail body and squeezing and squeezing. He is aware of his father’s face, through the glass, studying him meticulously as the air in his lungs seeps away.

He clatters to the floor just as the tentacles go limp. He’s dimly aware of someone calling his name, but all he can feel in the stickiness of his own insides and a dull thumping in his head. And then everything, everyone, is finally exactly how six wanted them to be: still and quiet.


	2. a burning example

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "For the first four years, there is a vague sense of repetition, as if he’s constantly watching sitcom re-runs. The feeling is unbearable by his fifth year, and gone by his sixth. By the time he’s seven, he has no recollection of the feeling whatsoever. And two months after his eighth birthday, Six dies yet again."

It’s odd, in a way, that the universe resets to stop the first death of the five-year-old super-child, Ben Hargreeves. When looking back on it, he often wonders if the universe knew about the worlds impending end, like a date marked in a calendar. He often wonders if his death really was a turning point for the world, one of those significant fixed events that just had to be kept to. Evidently so, otherwise it would’ve never gone as far to repeatedly save the life of someone such as Ben Hargreeves.

The second time he lives his life, it’s very similar to the first. For the first four years, there is a vague sense of repetition, as if he’s constantly watching sitcom re-runs. The feeling is unbearable by his fifth year, and gone by his sixth. By the time he’s seven, he has no recollection of the feeling whatsoever. And two months after his eighth birthday, Six dies yet again.

The second time six dies, it’s his siblings fault.

That’s certainly what Reginald believes. He’s building an academy, a superhero team, he tells the remaining children, and he can’t have a team that doesn’t look out for one another. And in some ways, it is there fault. It’s what Three tells herself in the mirror, morning and night. It’s what haunts Fours nightmares. It’s what Seven thinks every time she passes by Sixes vacant room: it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault.

He’s eight years old this time, and has grown somewhat into the uniform and mask of the umbrella academy. He’s still small for his age, especially in comparison to One and Three, who make him look much younger with their height and their sense of responsibility. In some ways, Six still gets lost in the crowd of extraordinary children, but not so much. He still hates the writhing sensation underneath his skin, the look of his rippling flesh as he stares at himself in the mirror. But he’s getting better at controlling, or as his father says, letting the monster control him. Some days, when he’s confident enough to let out the writhing tentacles, to tackle his training, to answer a hard equation put to him, he can swear that his father seems almost proud of him. 

He’s certainly not Reginald favourite. He still prefers Number One, who always follows his orders without any complaint, or Three, with her easily manipulation and willingness to exploit her powers. He doesn’t think he comes before Two either, his brother who always ropes him and Four into games of superheroes and never stops throwing his knives to practise and test his powers. 

But Six is sure that’s he’s definitely above Four, who always seems to come back from his training in tears, or Five who can never resist to answer back. And there’s no doubt he’s above Seven, who is in a way the most extraordinary of all of them by being the least interesting. It doesn’t matter if their father doesn’t care for her all that much, because she’s definitely Sixes favourite. 

He’s still the quiet one, in many ways. Always the last for training, the last to be in on one of his siblings’ secrets. He was the last to know when Two broke his foot, the last to be fitted for his new uniform. The one with the smallest room, the baggiest blazer and the one least likely to complain. Six often wonders if anyone would notice if he just slipped away. Sometimes, the answer is yes. When Seven comes to him after a nightmare, when Three helps him get dressed in the morning, when Four grabs his hand and declares Six his best friend, he is sure his siblings would notice if he disappeared. Other times, he is sure he is going to get lost amongst the arguments and the secrets and the empty hallways of the academy.

He tells Seven this, just once, in the safe darkness of his room. They’ve both tucked their knees to their chest, blankets pulled overhead to shield them from the outside world. Just minutes ago, seven had been recounting a dream, in which she was exploding, over and over again. Her face was red and her voice kept trembling and although Six knew she had been crying, he didn’t mention it.

Then, he returns the favour, reaching into his soul and pulling out his heaviest burden: the fear that Seven, and Five and Two and all the others will leave him behind. It breaks the heavy silence that had settled over them like thick syrup, and Six shifts uncomfortably.

Seven vows, locking their pinkie fingers together, clutching onto him tightly: “we’ll never leave you behind, Six. Never.”

And it helps ease his mind, just a little.

The day it happens is a strange one. Strange, in so many ways. Six wakes up at 5:34, but not to Grace waking him. Instead, his body wakes itself up, like its fitted with its own alarm clock. He scrunches up his eyes, wiping the sleep away with the back of his palms, and frowns at the empty room. He pulls himself out of bed, and tiptoes down the corridor, in search of another sign of life. The doors to each of his sibling’s rooms are pulled tightly shut, except Fives which sits back on its hinges to reveal his brother, asleep in his bed and snoring. His arm is flung over the side and he appears to be drooling. Six decides to let him sleep, and steps back to continue his search for their mom.

He finds Pogo first, replacing books in the library. He starts when he sees Six behind him, still in his pyjamas but with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

“Ah, Number Six, I didn’t think you would be up so soon. Are your brothers and sisters awake yet?” 

Ben shakes his head, but says nothing, just looks at Pogo quizzically. The monkey sighs, and sets off out of the library’s west entrance, gesturing for Ben to follow him. When they reach the kitchen, Pogo begins filling the kettle, whilst Ben slides into his usual seat expectantly.

“Now, Number Six, your father was called away to an urgent meeting in Nepal late last night. I don’t know many of the details, I only know that he will be back tomorrow morning to continue with your training,” he pauses, pushing his glasses up his nose and setting the kettle on the hob, “in the meantime, he thought it would be best if you all took a day off, to catch up on your extra readings and the such.”

Six frowns. A whole day with no training? Nothing to do?

His siblings seem much more ecstatic about this then he is, as Pogo tells them all about it as they invariably drift into the kitchen. Four cheers, jumping up on the chair and repeatedly chanting “No school! No school! No school!” Number Three laughs at him and grabs his hand, half-heartedly scolding him, telling him that he might hurt himself. Number Two barely waits half a second before grinning to himself and turning to run out of the room, whilst Five disappears through his usual spark of blue. Even Seven seems pleased, a small smile on her face as she rushes back upstairs, feet thundering on the stairs in a way Reginald would never allow. It’s only Number One who seems to share momentarily in Sixes confusion, his hands still folded politely behind his back as if expecting Reginald to walk in any second. He frowns and turns his attention to Six, who just shrugs, before he begins to question Pogo as to what their father is doing and what he is supposed to do in the meantime. 

Six doesn’t know what to do with himself either. He goes to the kitchen in search of Grace and Breakfast, but instead emerges with a packet of biscuits and a whole carton of milk. He eats his feast at the dining room table, alone, disrupting his routine only slightly by sitting in Number Seven’s seat. He knows his siblings are somewhere in the house but it’s just so big that it seems silent without them there, at the table with him. He abandons his feast and begins to wander around the house, tracing his finger along the display cabinets and scuffing his shoes against the fading carpet. He stops outside his father’s office, the shine of the metal plaque on the door catching his eye. He stands on his tiptoes to read the engravings, the cursive of the words spelling out Sir Reginald Hargreeves. As he does so, he hears the faint sound of rustling from the other side of the door. He peeks through the crack to see Number Five, rummaging through their father’s belongings, siphoning random papers and sticking them into the waistband of his shorts. Six leaves him. He doesn’t want to get in trouble with his father, when he returns, or with Five for spying on him.

He finds Numbers Three and One next, laying on Number Threes bed. They’re talking and listening to the radio and Three is laughing about something, her face all scrunched up. They look like they’re having fun, and Six almost goes into join them, because Three says he’s her favourite little brother and it seems like he has an understanding with One, a mutual respect for following the rules and their father. But he doesn’t go in, he knows they wouldn’t really want him there. He’s the little brother, the baby, the one who it’s fun to play with sometimes, but not to have around for ‘grown up’ things. So instead he backs away slowly, wishing he had a sibling to have that much fun with.

The soft sound of an F Minor scale floats along the corridor, and Six knows not to bother Seven. Outside in the courtyard he sees Two, carving something into the base of the oak tree. He watches him for a moment, and he looks up at Six and salutes, before going back to the tree.

That only leaves Number Four. He’s talking to someone when Six stops outside his door, eyes open but a little to the left and glazed over. He stops when he sees his brother, bats the invisible omen to his left away and ushers him in.

“Hey six, what you up to?” he begins, nudging him slightly with his elbow. The room is a mess and Six wonders how Four manages to get away with this. He never would.

He shrugs, “nothing really. I drank some milk?”

Four snorts, getting up of the floor to rummage around in his drawers for something. “you have an entire day of freedom and you choose to spend it… drinking milk? Really, oh brother of mine?”

Six laughs slightly, in spite of himself, “it wasn’t just a glass. I drank the whole carton.” He’s actually a little proud of it. For someone so keen on rules, he thinks it a bold move.

“whoa slow down there, Six. You’re going a little wild.” Six rolls his eyes, to which four sticks his tongue out in response. 

Then, he bashfully drops his gaze to the floor, unsure how to ask to ‘hang out’. He’s never really done that before, they never have the time to, not with their usual busy schedule. And it’s not that he’s not close with Four, it’s just that they never really spend any time alone- Four has Three, and Six has his Seven, his best friend. And the times that he does spend alone with Four often make him feel stupid, because Four always seems to know everything, even if they are only eight.

In the end, he doesn’t have to ask, because Four moves away from the drawer and pulls Six further into the room. “You’ve got to get in Six, we can’t have every one knowing about my secret stash. He pulls a bundle of comics from the drawer and tosses them to Six, who inspects the front cover. Four point at one of the covers, a comic called The Amazing Spider-man, issue #252, and informs I’m that “I think you’ll like that one.”

He spends most of the day there, in his brother’s room. they barricade the door shut, and sit cross legged opposite one another, working their way through the comic books. Four reveals his secret stash of sweets, mostly stolen from the bodega down the road, and Six lets him see his power a little- the tentacles just kept pushing against his skin persistently and it seemed easier just to let his  
Four see them. Four even tells Six a little about what it’s like to talk to the dead when he asks, but the other seems to go a little quiet when its brought up. 

Six isn’t sure how long he stays there, but after a while the soft strumming of the violin seems to fade away and the crackle of the radio abruptly cuts out. Four seems to already be asleep, slumped against the edge of his bed, face pressed against the wooden slats. Six takes his leave, tiptoeing down the corridor, edging the door to his room open slowly. He doesn’t even stop to take off his socks, just slips into the sheets, blazer and all.

When he awakes, he’s once again alone. But this time, his vision seems to be blurred by a thick, grey smog. He feels his lungs splutter as they fill with the substance and his nose wrinkles as it registers the smell of freshly burnt toast, like when Number Two once tried to fix them a midnight snack. Six sits bolt upright in bed, his head swimming. Has Two burnt toast again? Is it four setting his socks on fire again? He clambers out of his bed, swaying slightly. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he mutters to himself, swaying slightly as he takes hold of the door handle and twists.

Outside his room is much, much worse. The old structure of the Hargreeves mansion means that the wooden beams take little coaxing of the walls and are now enveloped in flames as they swing loosely from the ceiling. He tries to remember when his father taught him about these kind of situations, but his mind is a mess and his eyes sting as the smoke tendrils reach out to grabs at him. He pulls the collar of his shirt over his mouth and raises a hand to cover his head from falling debris.

He manages to make it down the corridor to Sevens room, but its empty, covers thrown back and dressing gown missing. Where was she? Had she already woken up? Had she left without him?

“No no no no no no,” he whispered, the tendrils of his insides bubbling under the surface with panic. He runs to Fours room, but that too is empty, deserted. One by one he tries each of his siblings’ rooms, only to find them vacant, with slippers and dressing gowns absent from their bedside resting places.

Six is aware he’s crying, the tears burning on his skin as they cascade down his face. He starts to scream, shout, calling out for his family. In a last desperate attempt, he tries the stairs, and find they’re not yet engulfed by flames. The middle of the hallway seems deserted and just behind it he can see the door, the fire licking at it. He feels the small burst of skin as a tentacle protrudes from his chest, encircling his body and threatening to squeeze out the last remaining wisps of air. Six knows he only has minutes, four minutes at most, until the staircase collapses so he clings to the barrier and pulls himself down, his feet weakening by the second. 

He reaches the foyer and collapses, his legs giving way beneath him. He tries to crawl towards the door but his vision is darkening and his voice is giving way. “Seven!” he screams, a final attempt to call to his siblings “Five! Three! Anyone!”

He sprawls out on the floor and tries to catch his breath, curling in on himself. The tentacles inside him embrace his shivering body, as if holding him together. He stares up at the flaking ceiling, just as the first beam slips towards him and a sense of de ja vu washes over his body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a few things because I'm aware my writing can be quiet vague sometimes:  
> 1) The Hargreeves siblings really do love Ben, he just fades into the background very easily and I could see him being temporarily forgotten about in an event such as this.  
> 2) The Klaus and Ben bromance is very slowly but surely emerging guys.  
> 3) Five isn't in this much because, even though I love him, he's a struggle to write as a background character as he can very easily be reduced to stereotypes. Also I was thinking of writing a one-shot about five that would slot into this chapter.  
> 4) The chapter title is taken from Millstone by Brand New (and it's an awful pun for this chapter, I'm sorry)


	3. make peace with the stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It’s five months after they become famous that the slowest death of Number Six begins."

The third time Six dies, it all happens a lot slower. 

It makes a change, he supposes, when looking back on all of them. A stark stand out in a bloody collage of haphazard deaths. Not that that fact makes it any less painful in his plethora of memories.

He’s eleven at the time, and yet to have his growth spurt. The beginnings of puberty have begun to wrap themselves around most of his siblings- Number One’s voice has dropped, and for about a month it kept breaking in the middle of sentences. Number Two and Four teased him about it for three more months, following him around the house and mimicking him- they stopped when he threatened to knock them through the wall into the street. Number Three enforces a strict no-boys rule in her room, and she has started to collect teen magazines, pinning various posters of various different body bands on her wall. 

Puberty isn’t the only thing new in the Hargreeves house. Shortly after their eleventh birthday, Reginald had announced that the alumni of The Umbrella Academy would be going public with their super human abilities. They were finally ready, he had told them, finally at one enough with their powers to begin bending them to their own will. Six doesn’t agree, not completely. He still feels unfamiliar with the creature under his skin, uncomfortable with his ‘power’, as his father puts it. But number Two beamed when he got the news, and even Five looked somewhat pleased with their new profile and Six can’t deny anything that makes his siblings, or their father, happy.

Things didn’t really change when they went public, at least not at first. It meant more missions, and more training, and a smooth, hard mask that he was expected to wear when fighting, but apart from that everything seemed normal. He still played superheroes with Two and Four, still studied maths with Three and Five, still had midnight feasts with Seven and talked about their worst fears. And Six didn’t mind being covered in a bit of blood, he really didn’t, if things could stay just like that.

But then, slowly but surely, things began to change. The Umbrella Academy became something of a spectacle, a glaring difference in the city of formality and grey-sameness. Suddenly, the missions began increasing and soon the media never seemed to leave the front steps of their houses. If Six was honest with himself, he hated it. Hated the attention, the interviews, the constant missions that left him covered head to toe in blood- sometimes, he couldn’t tell if the blood belonged to him, or the criminals. The media never seemed to leave them alone, couldn’t get enough of The Umbrella Academy, the extraordinary children, the world of crime fighting. 

And then, things began to change in the Hargreeves house too. Number One and Two started to train harder, spending all their time practising their skills in the courtyard. Six begs Two to play superheroes with him, just once, standing outside his room long after they should be asleep. Two is still fully dressed, sharpening his knives, sat on the edge of his bed.

“Please Two, just for a little bit? Please?” he begs, twisting his hands, pleading.

Number Two doesn’t even look up, just dragged the tool along the side of his blade with a horrifying scraping sound. “You should go back to bed, Six. It’s late, and Pogo will be up if he hears anything.”

Six doesn’t leave, instead taking a step into the room, lit only by a small slither of moonlight. “Please, we haven’t played in so long.” He whines, face scrunched up slightly to stop him from crying. He’s never been good at confrontation, but he just wants to play with his brother, just once.

 

The other boy looks up from the job at hand, startled confused, “What are you on about? We went on a mission yesterday. Six, don’t cry, come on-”

He leaves, runs back to the safety of his room and his bed and the darkness. Two doesn’t understand, he sniffles to himself, legs tucked up to his chest. The missions aren’t the same as playing. The missions are horrible, they hurt and they kill and destroy. Playing is just pretend, just fun.

It’s odd, to Six, that his siblings seem so happy. Three seems to thrive in the attention of the interviews, loves the way photographers ask them for pictures. Once, after they sneak out for doughnuts, a photographer manages to get a picture of them. Their father is livid the next day when he sees it in the paper and they are sent to bed with no supper, but Three doesn’t care. She just sits there with the paper, admiring her own picture. Later that night, Six sees her cut it out and stick it up on the wall, next to the other celebrities. In fact, it isn’t long before her walls are covered with her own photographs, posters and interviews, stuck there like a self-worshipping shrine. 

The others seem happier in different ways. Five lives for the missions, for the organisation, for the chance to improve and practise with his power. He tells Six this, as they sit opposite each other, practising maths equations. Six doesn’t agree. The less times he has to have his body ripped apart, the better. One and Two live for the chance to beat one another, to show off who’s the best. Their father encourages it, believing it will make them better fighters, and Six knows he’s sort of right. They do get better, spend more time practising, but they also get bolder and reckless. Once they bring Four home from a mission, his shirt ripped and stained with blood from where Two’s knife grazed his arm and Six knows their rivalry has extended long past friendly competition.

Of course, not all the Hargreeves seem happy with their new lifestyle. Six can’t even count how many times he watches through the stair railings as Four is brought back from training, sobbing profusely into his arms. After those nights, they sit in Sixes room, reading comics, or talking, or even sitting in silence, but always together. Four tells him how he’s the only one who could ever understand what it’s like to hate your power, that the other could never understand. And it shouldn’t, but it makes Six happy.

Those nights are the best. The worst nights are when Four arrives back in silence, when he refuses to sit with Six, refuses to even acknowledge his presence at the top of the stairs. They’re the worst nights because Six can feel him slipping out of his grasp, fading away, the chunks of his soul dropping onto the floor as he ascends the stairs to his room.

And he misses Seven, his best friend, more than anything else. The missions, the training, separates them unwillingly and Six feels like he’s lost an arm, or a leg, or some important part of himself. Seven isn’t allowed to go with them, their father says, because she has nothing special about her. Six disagrees. Seven is the most special, the most important, but Reginald just can’t see that. And Six can’t stand the missions without her there.

She comes to his room a lot less, stays in hers a lot more. The rare occasions she does come to him, they barely talk, just sit in the thick, syrupy silence, and let it drag them apart. He can feel her unhappiness, it vibrates of every inch of her being, but he doesn’t mention it, because he doesn’t want to talk about how unhappy he feels either.

But most importantly, most awfully, its Sir Reginald Hargreeves, their loving father, that seems most unhappy. The media attention doesn’t seem to sedate him. If anything it makes him more persistent that his Umbrella Academy will excel. Six supposes that’s why he makes the decision to up training hours and decrease recreational time. 

The training gets more and more intense, and becomes more and more frequent. Six barely feels like Six anymore. The tentacles never seem to sit comfortably inside his body, always being dragged out for some purpose or another- bank heist, training, hostage situation, training, art thief, training. It’s exhausting, and he feels drained all the time. It even becomes a regular occurrence that he falls asleep in his evening meal. Usually his siblings would tease him for that, but they seem exhausted too. The dark circles under Number Ones eyes inform Six he’s not sleeping either, and he doesn’t need a bodily sign to tell him Five is awake the whole night- the sounds of frantic writing through the thin walls do that for him. More often than not, Six wakes in the middle of the night to find Number Four climbing in through his window. He squints at him, rubbing his eyes tiredly, and Four tells him to go back to bed. 

“No,” Six whispers, stubbornly pulling himself up in his bed and switching on the bedside lamp, “not until you come to bed as well.”

Normally, the nights’ end with the boys wrapped around on another, neither one falling back asleep.

 

And the newspapers don’t help either. They can’t seem to get enough of him, his power, his profile. They nickname him ‘The Horror’ and Six loves that, he really does, because he didn’t know it was possible to hate himself anymore. 

It’s five months after they become famous that the slowest death of Number Six begins.

Hargreeves isn’t happy. Six knows this from the way he is frowning up at him from his desk, papers abandoned and ink staining the corner of the page.

Six fidgets slightly, hands folded behind his back, eyes glazed as he stares just above his father’s head. His mind his racing. What did I do? Did I forget something? Did I let a bad guy get away? Is my uniform on wrong? He hurriedly looks downs and straightens his jumper, flattening it with the palms of his hands.

Reginald clears his throat, and Six snaps to attention, hands flying behind his back and eyes rising to meet his fathers; well, almost. Hargreeves begins to speak, unhooking his monocle and cleaning it on the hem of his shirt.

“It has come to my attention, Number Six, that you are still not unlocking your full potential. There is something to be said for the underlying powers that you are still to unlock, and how they could further aid you in missions.”

Six frowns, temporarily, as Reginald reaches down for a notebook, but quickly pushes his face back into a passive expression. Underlying powers? He thinks to himself, heart thundering. Something more than the creature inside him?

Reginald looks up from the red notebook in his hand after studying the page in question for some time, and reaches out towards Six. His palm unfurls to reveal a blue tub, full to the brim of tiny red pills. “If you take these twice a day, Number Six, you should soon be able to reach your full potential. You are dismissed.”

And so he begins to take the tablets twice a day.

At first, they have no effect, other than a side splitting headache. It makes him sob and twist in agony, sweating through his bed sheets. His mom doesn’t leave his side the whole time, stroking his head and clutching his hand as he shakes and vomits. Six knows it’s bad by the third day, when he’s allowed to miss a mission to stay at home in bed. Reginald inspects him from the hallway, mouth pressed into a thin line, before declaring that Six can miss one mission for the sake of his health. Whilst the rest of his siblings are away, Seven begs Grace to let her sit with him. Begrudgingly, she’s permitted to, and she spends the entire day curled around him, alternating between singing softly to him and reading him one of Number Fours comic books.

And then, as soon as the headache came, it goes, and Six is back to his original schedule. The training begins again, straight away, faster and harsher than ever. The medication seems to work. Six can control the creature better than ever, and the tentacles seem to double in size, twisting up the stairwell and into his siblings’ rooms. Reginald tests their strength too, and seems delighted to find they can lift triple what they could before. He tells Six this is a massive improvement, a hint of pride slipping through his tone and Six immediately runs to excitedly tell Four, as he sits under the tree in the courtyard. Four is carving every swear word he knows into the trunk, whilst Six eagerly enacts the moment in training. 

“and then- Four, listen to this- and then he told me it was a massive improvement!” he beams, clasping his hands together, “do you hear that Four? If I’ve improved, that means I’m getting better!”

Four doesn’t say anything, just wedges the pocket knife into the base of the tree. 

“four?” he questions tentatively.

Four sighs, then turns to face his brother. “It’s great, Six, it really is just- don’t get your hopes up, yeah?”

Sixes face falls and he can feel an involuntary bubble in his stomach, “What do you mean?” he edges slightly closer, his tone biting slightly.

The séance drops it straight away, unfolding his legs and using Sixes shoulder to pull himself up. “Nothing. Congratulations, Six.”

For a while, the tentacles just keep getting stronger and longer and more powerful. Three months into the medication, Six is sure that if their ranking were changeable, he’d be Number One by now. The number of missions just seem to keep increasing and that makes Six happy, it does, he’s happy, he really is, because that way he can prove he’s the best Hargreeve. And that’ll make his dad proud, he’s sure of it. 

It isn’t too long after their fifth foiled bank heist that the headaches start again. He ignores them at first, puts them to the side as just nerves, or tiredness, or irritation from the constant sound of number Sevens violin runs. It isn’t until he collapses in training that he starts to believe that he could really be ill again. His father looks down at him, crumpled and curled in on himself, and disappointment lines his face. He leaves him there, crying softly, tentacles embracing his fetal form. Its Five who finds him, who helps him upstairs to his room, who sits with him whilst he tries to remember how to breathe.

Six doesn’t want to accept that it could be the medication that could now be weakening him, instead of strengthening him. And neither does Reginald because he refuses to acknowledge it, refuses to let Six skip anymore missions, even when Pogo tells him it could be fatal. Six wonders, looking back, whether his father knew he was dying even then, and was just trying to get the last drops out of his Number Six.

He collapses in the safe of New York federal bank, surrounded by the bodies of the robbers, his tentacles blackened and stretched out across the floor. Scarlet blood drips steadily from his stomach but his skin is white as a ghost. Its Number One who finds him this time and he carries him all the way home, refusing to let any of the others help, even when he begins to cry softly to himself.

In fact, his brother doesn’t leave him all night, just sits on the end of his bed in silence. Slowly, one by one as the night darkens and the house becomes silent, his siblings filter in. Five takes stance by the door, watching for their father. Two and Four hover by the window, the former playing with a butter knife whilst the latter bites his nails nervously. It’s Three who takes up the role of mom, stroking his hair repeatedly. And Seven, his Seven, curls up next to him, holding on like someone might take him away any second. 

Pogo passes by just as it turns one, and there is a second when Six thinks he may tell them all to leave but he just gently informs them that they must be down for breakfast at 6:00 then closes the door without another word.

It’s obvious to everyone in the house that he’s dying, Six thinks mournfully, in between bursts of pain. The creature inside him is already dead, tentacle hanging limp of the side of the bed. They’re twisted and disfigured in colour and as Five points out to the others when he thinks Six is asleep, they’ve rotted his insides. Weirdly, that though doesn’t scare him. Instead he feels oddly peaceful knowing that his creature didn’t kill him but died right alongside him, infected by that toxic medication.

Six knows he’s going to die the first night he collapses, but it takes a while longer for his body to actually wither away. That’s what makes that death the worst, he thinks when he looks back- the loneliness and the steady pain he felt as his third life drew to a close.

It is odd that a boy in a house so full of noisy children can die quietly and alone. But the next day, the Hargreeves children are taken out on a mission. The atmosphere is somber as they suit up, the only noise being Reginald’s barking orders and the occasional sniffle from Number Three as she pauses outside Sixes room, flashing him a watery smile. Even Seven has to leave him, being escorted away by Grace for her violin lesson.

Six doesn’t die when they’re out, despite his body giving up on him and the fluid seeping into his punctured lungs. Instead he stares out of his door, at the portrait on his siblings that hands opposite, scanning their eyes with his face, taking in every last detail of their masked faces. Every flinch of pain sends a bolt of familiarity up his pine, but he ignores it and instead focuses on his siblings.

They’re sat at the dinner table, eating in silence, when Number Four feels it. It’s like a bolt of electricity passing through his chest and it makes him jolt, pushing back from the table.

“Number Four, sit down. You have not be excused.” Reginald barks, but instead Four lets out a strangled sound, before turning and running in the direction of his brother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Atlas:Six by Sleeping At Last (just one of the songs on my Ben Hargreeves playlist which is a killer)  
> Also I really struggled with this chapter but I think?? I like the finished result?? Hope you enjoyed!!


	4. with all my faults

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It’s somewhere in the midst of pretending to be normal that Ben Hargreeves gets lost in his oddity. And that’s when he dies for the fourth time."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possible trigger warning: suicidal thoughts and actions?? please be wary if you're affected by that sort of thing!!

The fourth time Six dies, he’s no longer Six.

It’s odd, after being a number for so long, to finally be pinned to an identity. The name, Ben Hargreeves, felt so different in his mouth, and sounded so strange when uttered by others.

Their numbers are squirreled away for mission use only, filed alongside their superhero aliases and tucked neatly alongside their crime fighting uniforms. One, Two, Three, Four and Seven become Luther, Diego, Allison and Vanya, average siblings who squabble over clothes and slam doors and blast loud music through the thin walls.

Five is a different story. Number Five Hargreeves is destined to always remain a number, a tally, a tool for his father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Ben always supposes, in reflection, that its Five’s disappearance that forced Reginald to see his ‘children’ as just that- children, not experiments. Maybe that’s why, six months into their thirteenth year, they are granted with names.

Nothing seemed to change when Number One instead became Luther. He still acts like the first child, the highest ranking in their father’s eyes. The cockiest, the smartest, and the tallest, he’s destined to always be Number One. He still barks out the orders in the voice he inherits from their father, despite the constant regaling he gets from Number Two, or Diego.

Diego’s name suits him the best, Ben thinks. It’s tough, and wily and seems to have an edge to it. And that’s Diego through and through. Mom gave him his name first, handed it to him like a flower picked from the garden. And Diego treasures it as such, shedding the identity of Number Two. “The numbers are stupid,” he tells Ben as he packs away his knives after a mission, carefully slotting them back into the hard grooves of the metal case. “It’s just dad’s way of keeping us in line. He knows that if I was number one, I’d flip the whole system.” Ben believes him.

The place of Number Three is traded out for the name Allison. Once, when he’s meant to be researching Ancient Greece, Ben looks up what Allison means in the library. It means truth. It’s so obvious to him that Number Three’s name is wrong, because she is the very opposite of truth. But she seems to like it, and after catching her practising the word in the mirror, Ben lets the whole meaning thing go.

And then there’s Klaus. That’s Ben’s favourite name by far- he loves the way it sounds, the strong defiance of the way the letters arrange themselves on the page. It’s also German, a language Ben adores, and he tells his brother this excitedly.

“Oh, really?” Klaus sounds unbothered, but he does that a lot these days and Ben knows it really just means he’s trying to play it cool.  
“Yes, yes it is, you can tell by the way the sounds form in your mouth and- hey guess what Klaus? It also comes from the word Nicholas, which basically means Father Christmas. Do you get it? That makes you Santa Klaus.”

Klaus actually laughs at that, and Ben feels so proud because the name didn’t make his brother happy, but at least he can.

And then there is Vanya- Ben doesn’t know what to think of that name. At first, he loves it, loves the shape it makes in his mouth, loves the sharp edges that jut out of the syllables. It feels so special, so like Number Seven, like Vanya. 

But then, later that night Vanya climbs under his quilt, her blurry red eyes fixed on his. She’s been crying and he reaches up to brush away the patch of redness but she bats him away, rubbing at her face. Then, she turns away from him, silent, and stares at the wall opposite. It’s silent for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, and Ben is sure his sister has fallen back asleep. Then:

“I hate it.” Her sharp hiss breaks the silence, and Ben feels her tense under the blankets. “It’s so… different.”  
“To being Number Seven?” Ben whispers, prompting.  
There’s is a momentary lapse of silence until she shakes her head. “No. I just mean, it’s just so special and extraordinary. And I’m… Not.”

 

Bens chest aches, because he knows how that feels, he does. When Mom gave him his name, he was delighted. She had bent down, with a smile just for him, and asked him if he liked it. He nodded furiously because he did, he loved. Ben is so bright, so happy and round and it pops in the mouth. He loves it when Allison shouts it down the stairs, when Klaus wheezes it when laughing, when Vanya whispers it through the dark. 

But the thing is, he knows deep down that it doesn’t fit. It never can. It’s such a normal name, the type a mother would shout to a child in the park, or the name that would get asked out to the prom. And Ben is the opposite of normal. He can’t be normal when his stomach writhes and when his chests bursts and when he has to clench his fists till they bleed, just so the creature fades away. He can’t imagine the name ever really fitting him, not while the tentacles squeeze and squeeze at his heart.

And his siblings seem to be easily fitting into their names, fitting into normal. Since Five vanished they all seem to have embraced life outside missions, outside the academy. Diego seems to be the first to search for something else. Ben finds him after three am on the Wednesday morning, hunched over a pile of textbooks at the kitchen table, scribbling away in a notebook.

Ben rubs at his eyes to check he’s not dreaming, then stutters, “what are you doing?” into the cold, quiet air of the kitchen.  
Diego barely looks up, his fleeting glance quickly taking in his brother, stood in the middle of the kitchen, clutching a glass. “Nothing. Studying. What time is it?”  
Ben slips into the seat across from him, swinging his feet slightly. “twelve past three. What are you studying? I thought you finished all the equations yesterday?”  
Diego pauses, pen raised slightly above the paper, and frowns. “You should be in bed. And I did, of course I did. I’m studying something else-” he casts a glance around the kitchen, then leans in closer, “promise you won’t tell anyone.”  
“tell anyone what?”  
“No one, Ben, not a soul.”  
“I won’t.”  
“I’m serious Ben, no one. Not Mom or Dad or Klaus. Or Vanya.”  
“I promise,” Ben vows, holding his hands in mock salute.  
Diego lowers his voice, and cautiously whispers, “I’m training to be in the police force. I don’t need much to pass the entrance exam to college, and if I start studying now I can be out of here by the time we’re both eighteen.” He grins, and leans back, “I’ll be a free man, Ben.”

And Ben just lets the confession sit in the air. It’s a stark reminder to him that his siblings, they can leave The Umbrella Academy behind. They can swan off with their normal names and their manageable powers, and they can live like nothing about them is weird or off. Ben wishes more than anything that he could do that.

Normality explodes into his routine again, only twelve days after the conversation with Diego. They’re eating dinner, and Ben is studying because he fell asleep the night before and didn’t have time to finish his biology work. He’s just about finished when their father stands up and the rest of the family scrabble to follow his lead, just as they’re instructed to do. 

“You may all sit down now,” he orders, his tone reverberating. They take their seats in a cacophony of chair scrapes and mumbled conversation. “Quiet!” Reginald begins again, voice commanding them into silence. “I have an important announcement. Earlier today, I received news that Number Seven has been accepted into the Harrington’s School for Girls on the basis of a musical scholarship. Of course, this is not normally behaviour I would encourage but as Number Seven is not a vital part of The Umbrella Academy, I have allowed her to board at this school during the term times. I will take no further questions.”

Ben can barely breath, and he slowly raises his eyes from where his hands are clasped. Allison is staring at her plate, as if trying to use some sort of laser vision to see beneath the table. Klaus seems to be holding onto his seat, clutching on for dear life. Ben turns his gaze to Vanya, who is staring straight ahead, chin raised and eyes fixed on Hargreeves, who is looking directly at his meal. She knew, she knew, she knew, Ben thinks, eyes stinging and nails digging into the palms of his clenched fists. She knew, and she didn’t tell anyone but dad. She knew and she didn’t even tell you Ben, her best friend. 

Vanya leaves the day after. The house is silent, no goodbyes are uttered, but Ben watches her through a gap in his curtain as she marches down the front steps, violin and suitcase in hand. She doesn’t even look back at the house, not even momentarily, doesn’t try to talk to Ben and it breaks his heart in two. When the car speeds away down the road, he’s pretty sure it drives over his broken heart, splintering and cracking it into a dozen smaller pieces.

“Why did she have to go?” Ben asks Luther later that night, as they wash the dishes from dinner side by side.  
Luther just sighs, and shrugs, cleaning the same spot on the dish over and over and over again. “I guess she was just too normal. I guess she wanted to be around other normal people.”

Ben understands that. If he was normal, he couldn’t imagine wanting to have a monster like him as his best friend either.

He understands, he really does, how some of his siblings can slip so well into ‘normal’. Diego has the police force and if anything, his powers would just make him a better office. Allison can have whatever she wants, and if she decides normal is what she wants, then there’s no doubt that she’d take that in a heartbeat. Ben notices her taking whatever she wants these days; she’s learnt how to manipulate the press alongside the criminals and she never seems to be short of attention, be it feature interviews or invites to red carpets. 

If anything hurts the most, it’s how Klaus seems to embrace the normal too. He can’t have normal the same way that the others can, Ben knows this. He can’t just live life surrounded by the shadows so he seems to find another way. Ben isn’t sure where he picks up the habit, but it must be from the places he goes at night because soon Klaus is trying everything to flush the demons out of his system. He stashes away their father’s alcohol right alongside his contraband sweets and comics and soon it is joined by a plethora of other vices: pills and weed, mostly pills and weed, but different kinds of substances too, ones that Ben couldn’t name.

And he would stop Klaus, he really would, but if his powers could be flushed out with the drugs too he’d be taking them right alongside his brother.

It’s somewhere in the midst of pretending to be normal that Ben Hargreeves gets lost in his oddity. And that’s when he dies for the fourth time.

The thing is, It’s not that he means to die this time. It’s not even that he thinks he’ll die, or that he’s even trying at all. The only actual thought on his mind is that he needs to be normal. All his other siblings seemed to slot so easily into normality, but he can’t? it’s not fair. It’s not his fault he was born with a living organism inside him, screaming out for attention and relief. 

The first step, he decides, is to run a bath. He bolts the door shut and slides the laundry basket underneath the handle, jamming it shut. Then, he twists the rust of the tap. The bath slowly begins to fill, the cold and warm water mingling together, swirling in the basin. He contemplates adding bubbles, but stops himself- the bath will work just fine as is for what he’s about to do. 

Then, he strips down to his underwear, pulling off the thick layers of his academy uniform. He neatly folds each item and places it by the sink, keeping a strict order. What is coming next will be mayhem, he tells himself, so it’s best to keep a structure now. 

The water is freezing when he steps in tentatively, and it seemingly turns to ice under the heat of his steaming body. He pushes down at the tentacles then probe at his flesh, whispering a coarse “not yet” to the creature beneath his skin.

Once he’s in, he reaches behind the bottles of shampoo to retrieve the knife he had hidden there. Its Diego’s, meaning its cold and hard but sits smooth in between the grooves of his hand. He’d taken it from his brother earlier in the week, and hidden it. Diego had got into so much trouble when he couldn’t find it and was forced to scrub the stairwell all night. Ben had cried himself to sleep, the knife tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He hated himself for doing that to Diego, but he had to, he just had to, it was the only way he could try to be normal.

He leans back in the bath, eyes closed, and breathes deeply. One, two, three, four- he can hear the sound of heavy bass coming from Klaus’ room and he covers his ears. Five, Six, Seven- he must be imagining it, because he’s sure that he can hear the sound of a violin thumping in his ears. Eight, nine, ten, eleven-

The creature erupts without warning, tearing his stomach to the remains of a tattered flag. He casts his eyes down, heart pounding, and lifts the knife. The tentacle is persistent in his grip, wriggling and weaving, but he manages to drive the knife into the side and-

It feels like his leg is being pulled from his body. He grits his teeth, face flushing red with the pain and begins to saw at the limb which struggles in his fist. He lets out a low grunt as a flash of pain ricochets up his spine and the tentacle finally detaches, falling limp on to the floor. He takes another, then another, then another, hacking and sawing and biting back scream after scream.

The water is red, he notes dully, eyes blurring as he flickers in and out of consciousness.

He isn’t sure when he realises it. Maybe it takes five minutes. Maybe it’s more like two hours. Maybe it takes day of him lying there, bleeding out in the rapidly cooling water of the bathtub. But in between lapses of consciousness and the echoing sound of violin strings, it comes to him.

He can’t separate the monster from within him, can’t hack of the limbs one by one and hope he can still live with the gaping, vacuous hole in his chest.

He realises then, how stupid it was to try and separate the two. How he ever thought he could chop of his head and still be able to breathe.

The laugh that escapes his mouth is bitter and he lets his head fall back onto the rim of the bathtub. the familiar tendrils of death claw at his body, just as a knock echoes around the bathroom and Vanya’s soft, familiar tone calls out

“Ben?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a few things:  
> 1) I'm sorry for doing that to Ben and for pulling him and Vanya apart. This chapter was so hard to write because I was just feeling for the both of them so much  
> 2) Chapter title is taken from I Of The Storm by Of Monsters and Men which is the ultimate Ben song  
> 3) Thank you to everyone who leaves Kudos or a lovely comment!! having my work seen by this many people is so daunting, never mind people telling me it's actually good and i want to thank everyone who keeps me writing!! I'm aiming to have the final two chapters up this week also, so stay tuned!!


	5. a shame that the root of it's me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Easter break arrives. As does Vanya. And death, for the fifth time."

The fifth time Ben dies, he really is a monster.

He’s fifteen, still a little too short and a little too young for his age. Everyone around him seems to have shot up and up, and now they all tower above him- with the exception of Vanya who he’s sure will always be the smallest of them all. Not that he’s 100% sure she is still as small as he remembers her to be. She’s always at school, and when she is home, she locks herself in her room for hours on end. And as Ben knows, memory is a tricky thing. Memory tells him that Vanya used to be his best friend. He’s not sure that was ever true.

Height isn’t his only issue. His voice is yet to drop, unlike his brothers, and it’s still two octaves too high. Diego makes fun of him for that, when they get back from missions: “how can you try to be threatening, Ben? You sound like Dora the Explorer.” 

So Ben takes to his bedroom mirror, and tries to practise being threatening. It doesn’t come naturally to him, like it does for Luther, or Diego, or even Allison. Even in the empty loneliness of his room, he feels stupid, like a child playing cops and robbers.

Puberty has, however, hit the rest of his siblings, which is just his luck. Luther has a face scarred with spots from acne, which is not something Ben wants, but he also has a deep voice and muscles that define themselves through his shirt. Diego has taken to flirting with anyone in a fifty-mile radius, making missions almost impossible. Ben wishes, more than anything, that he could charm people the way Diego can. 

Allison and Klaus instead take an interest to make up and gossip, something Ben very much does not want. They sit, cross-legged on Allison’s bed, and swap stories about boys and paint each other nails. Klaus asks, several times, if Ben wants to join them but he always declines, because he doesn’t fit there and they wouldn’t really want him anyway.

He often wonders if Five, wherever he is, is going through the same thing as Ben. Whether or not he now has a voice two octaves lower, or the shadow of a beard, or if he likes to talk about girls all day long. Probably not, he tells himself. That doesn’t sound like Five.

The one person he wishes he could talk to about all this is Vanya. His best friend, his partner in crime, the one he used to play Tag 123 with and steal biscuits from Luther’s secret stash with. But Vanya has closed the door on their friendship- and then she bolted it shut and slid a chair under the handle. Sometimes, when she’s at school, he’ll pick the lock from the outside and just sit in her room. It’s the closest thing to her that he can find. 

Once, when he’s in her room, Pogo finds him, sat hugging his legs by her bed. It’s past midnight and he should be in bed and he shouldn’t even be in her room at all, not when it was supposed to be locked. But still, when Pogo starts to scold him, Ben feels ‘It’ for the first time.

And odd sensation, starting in the pit of his stomach but snaking its way through his stomach like red-hot oil. It feels tingly, like pins and needles, then as hot as soup. His brain feels like it’s going to vibrate through his skull and he might just erupt because Pogo is scolding at him and he’s done nothing wrong and he just needs to shut up.

Ben doesn’t say any of this. He manages to hold in the feeling until Pogo finishes his lecture, then he practically scampers to his room and spends the whole night sat in bed, shaking. He felt so angry. He felt like he actually wanted to hurt Pogo, and he can’t say why. All he knows is that he wanted the creature to erupt from his stomach so badly.

Its weeks before he feels that angry again, and he’s starting to wonder if it was real when he feels it again. It’s just gone seven p.m. and he’s spent the whole day training. His voice is scratchy from practising his threatening voice and all he wants is to curl up in bed and forget the day ever happened. He pads to the kitchen, and twists the stiff tap, a soft trickle of water slowly filling the waiting glass. When it’s done, he turns to go back upstairs, when he sees two shadows by the front door. They’re giggling and hushing each other. Ben squints, just making out the contour of two noses and chins as they step further into the light.

It’s Allison and Klaus, shivering in their academy uniforms. They’re red in the face, cheeks puffed out with stifled laughter. They freeze when they see Ben, basked in the light of the kitchen, glass in hand. 

He scrunches up his nose, “I thought you two were studying in your room,” he gestures to Allison, “that’s what you told dad?” it comes out as a question, but he’s certain on the answer.

 

Allison looks towards Klaus, who throws his arm around Ben’s shoulder and pulls him into the shadows, “We just went out for some air.” Their sister nods in hurried agreement, and the uncertainty settles itself even more in Ben’s head.

“When?” he probes, crossing his arms and pulling himself away from Klaus. 

“Well, time is relative, little brother-”

“I’m the same age as you.”

“- so what does it really matter when we went out?”

Ben scowls, and he feels the tiny pinpricks of rage prod at his chest. “You snuck out, didn’t you? You’ve been gone the whole day!”

Klaus’ smirk falters, and he clears his throat. “well, I guess so. I mean. Yeah. We have.”

Ben bites at his lip, whilst his brain screams at him to do something. He ignores it.

“Well, you were training all day so we couldn’t’ve hung out anyways and then Allison suggested-”

Allison glares at him, and Klaus alters his story, “- okay, so I suggested we should go to a spa or something and- don’t look at me like that Ben, you would’ve hated it, it’s not your kind of thing.”

“Plus,” Allison cuts in quickly, “dad would’ve noticed if you’d come with, and you hate getting in trouble.”

Excuses, Bens head screams. He can feel his blood increasing in degrees every few seconds and the monster coils in his stomach. He’s scared, so scared, that he’s going to hurt his siblings and he can’t stand that so instead he starts for the stairs. Allison stops him.

“Shit, Ben,” she steps forwards, grasping him by the arms, “please don’t tell dad, please. I’ll do all your homework for the week-”

“I’m not going to tell dad, Alli,” he cuts her off, clenching his fists which twitch uncontrollably. He pulls back from her, fleeing up the stairs before he can do anymore damage.

After that, the encounters with the anger become more and more frequent. Allison and Klaus try to bridge the gap, to reach out to him, but Ben knows it’s all empty gestures. They don’t really want him around; they’re just trying to smooth the ever-growing cracks in the Hargreeves family. For once, Ben doesn’t feel like indulging them. 

Everything that happens after that night seems to fuel the rage in the pit of his stomach. Every time he drops something, gets a disapproving look from his father. Every time Diego teases him, every time Allison laughs, every time he hears Luther’s records he wants to scream and tear things apart. Let the monsters tear him apart.

There are gaps between the moments of madness still, fractions of time where his head feels clear and where he fits in with his siblings still. It like for every moment of anger, there are ten moments of peace, which is manageable. That’s what Ben tells himself.

The first time he acts on his anger is terrifying. He’s done such a good job of keeping it inside, of not letting it out. But it’s a Tuesday evening, and he’s lonely, and Diego and Luther are in the courtyard training. All he wants to do is practice with them, but Luther keeps telling him he’s not skilled enough, that he doesn’t have enough strength and that he won’t keep up. The anger is just so strong inside of him, and it makes his whole body vibrate. Diego’s knife is just in reach and his fingers wrap around the blade. The voice inside of him screams at him to throw it at Luther, throw it straight at his head, show him all your skill. But instead, he turns his shaking hand to the target opposite, white with rage.

Diego yells at him, and he cries for hours afterwards. Not because he made his brother mad, but because he let his madness out. And he feels so so scared of himself, of what he’s capable of.

He tries to stay away from his siblings after that, terrified he’ll hurt them, that he’ll lose control. Not that he has to try hard to keep away from them. The knife incident means that Luther and Diego are still angry with him, and he’s already pushed Allison and Klaus away. That just leaves Vanya, and she hasn’t been home since the Christmas break. So there’s no one left around him to hurt, and that’s just how Ben wants it to be. Well, that’s what he tells himself. 

He only really talks to his siblings on missions, as Reginald insists they ‘work better as a team’. That means that Ben gets to pretend, usually about twice a week, that they’re all still eleven, and still best friends. It’s at one of these missions that the monster inside of him feeds off Bens anger for the first time.

The mission was meant to be simple- Luther would go in first, protect the hostages, whilst Diego took down half perps. Then, Ben would handle the remaining offenders in the vault, whilst Allison spoke to the boss, sweetly asking him to hand himself in. Klaus would wait outside and deal with press- he’d long since “lost” his ability, as he claimed. Not that anyone believed him. 

But for some reason, the plan seems to crumble in its last act. Allison leans forward to deliver her line just as the boss begins to cock his gun and aim it at her chest- his finger hovering over the trigger, Allison unaware of what is transpiring. Ben pushes his way past his brother who watch the hostages in blissful ignorance and steps between his sister and the gunman. It isn’t the first time he’s used his power to tear apart the bodies of ‘bad guys’. But this time, as the blood coats him and the tentacles fizz with anger, he enjoys it. He grins, pulling the man limb from limb whilst he screams out in agony until he swiftly separates his head from his body then discards of the parts on the floor. It isn’t until the tentacles retreat and Ben clears his mask of blood that he notices his siblings watching him. Staring at him, with blood dripping down his shirt and a smile, now dying on his face.

None of them mention it. The only person who tries to bridge the gap at all is Klaus. He notices Bens tear stained face and puffy red eyes at dinner and slips him a note scrawled on a napkin, simply reading ‘are you okay?’. A sad face has been hastily added next to the writing, as well as a bunch of flowers. Ben glances at his brother across the table and nods, forcing a small smile. And Ben wills Klaus to push it, to ask again and again until he breaks and lets it all out.

But he doesn’t, and by the next day, Klaus is avoiding him too. One of them must’ve told him, Ben thinks glumly. Part of him gets it, understands why they’re scared, but he feels so angry that they don’t care how scared he feels too.

The weeks till Easter crawl by and Ben counts the days. Counts the days till Vanya comes home, till he can see his sister again and tell her how damn scared he feels and how much he misses her. He actually crosses the days off on his calendar. He might as well scratch them into the wall- the Hargreeves house feels more like a prison than ever now. The only people he talks to are his father, when he’s training, and Grace in the mornings when she comes to wake him up. Even Pogo seems wary of him, avoiding him and only speaking to him when Ben is the first to bring something up. 

Instead, he turns to studying harder. He reads his way through the entire library, scouring the shelves for more, more to push his brain and distract himself from the overbearing loneliness. And the anger that bubbles away inside of him.

Easter break arrives. As does Vanya. And death, for the fifth time. 

She arrives at 12:16 on the Saturday before Easter. Ben knows this, because he has been sat at the window four hours before the taxi pulls up onto the curb. Vanya struggles out, as Ben watches her, clutching a suitcase in one and her violin in the other. She hasn’t grown, he observes. Her hair is shorter, clipped just below her shoulders and her fringe is swept to one side, like she’s growing it out.

Ben bundles down the stairs, footsteps thundering. He’s grinning ear to ear, and he doesn’t care if Allison is watching him warily, or if Diego is stood slightly in front of Klaus, as if protecting him. He doesn’t care, because he’s going to see his Vanya. 

She pushes her way through the doors, manoeuvring the heavy items in her hands, refusing help from Pogo. She beelines for the stair, but Ben is stood there, in her way, smiling across at her.

“hey Vanya,” he whispers, heart pounding.

“Uh, hey Ben,” she returns awkwardly, lips straining to a half-smile.

“How was… your journey?” he starts, wanting just to envelope her into a hug. She just sort-of shrugs, her face noncommittal. 

Ben tries again, “It’s Saturday, so we’ve got some free time so-”

“Ben,” she cuts in, trying to step around him, “I’m really tired, could you just- leave me alone- just- go play with Klaus or something.” Her voice is stilted, and she’s looking anywhere but him and that’s when Ben remembers- Vanya doesn’t need to know about his Kill-Joy to hate him. She can’t stand being around him anymore, anyway. She already knows he’s a monster without him proving it. 

He side-steps to let her past and she bundles herself up the stairs hurriedly.

She starts practising the violin. It must be a hard melody, because her bow stilts and scratches against the strings and the runs leave her breathless. Ben’s not sure how long he sits there, listening to her through the thin walls, but it can’t be more than twenty minutes. Actually, it could be three days. The anger within him seems to build with each note, each irritated sigh, each turn of sheet music. He’s going to erupt any second, he’s going to blow through the wall and take Vanya and that stupid violin with him and-

Grace calls them down for dinner. Their father isn’t there, not that he’s normally there, he’s normally working in his office. When their father used to vanish for dinner they would all bend the rules slightly, talking in hushed whispered and passing notes across the table. Today, everyone talks, but not to Ben. Diego shifts away from him in his seat, like always, and the empty chair next to him never felt more glaring than in this moment.

Grace is humming to herself as she cleans the dishes in the kitchen and the noise is just too much and then Ben feels himself pushing back from the table.

“Why,” his voice begins as barely more than a scratchy whisper, “won’t any of you talk to me?” He kicks the chair backwards and it falls to the ground with a clatter. Klaus flinches and scrambles back from the table too. 

“Ben, sit down,” Luther, ever the teacher’s pet, hisses at him. Ben balls his fists up and shakes his head.

“Ben, what are you doing?” Allison furrows her brow, standing up and reaching out towards him.

His voice begins to shake in his throat, vibrating off the walls. “You’re all- You’re all scared of me. I’m not a monster, you’re making me- you’re making me a monster and I’m not, I’m not a monster.”

“no one’s making you a monster, Ben,” Luther says softly. He sounds sincere, but the way he steps in front of Allison stings because Ben knows that he is there to protect her.

He claws at his hair with his hands, “Yes! Yes, you are you all think I’m a monster, I think I’m a monster and its making me into a monster. None of you are helping. You’re all making it worse.”

Vanya blinks up at him. She’s the only one who hasn’t moved, rooted to her seats, holding herself down with her hands. “I’m sorry, Ben. I promise you, I don’t think you’re a monster. You’re my best friend.”

Ben knows the anger is consuming him, that he can’t undo the damage about to be inflicted by himself. The tentacles curl into his hands, close around his fists and he tips his head back, mouth open, just waiting and waiting, and whispering into the air “you all need to get out of here. Please.”

Then, just as it has a million times before, his body tears itself in two, everything is white and hot and it oozes across the room. He can vaguely register the feeling of a tentacle wrapping around a body but he doesn’t know whose it is, just that its alive and writhing. He feels like he’s wearing beer goggles, the world distorted like he’s spacing out. He can’t feel blood, but he knows it’s coming, knows that he won’t be able to stop himself from squeezing the life out of everyone in the room.

He thinks he can register Allison screaming, but all her words seem to hit the same monotone note, white noise in his raging state. He sees the vague contours of Klaus and Luther, fighting against the tentacles, bending under the strength of Ben’s superhuman state. To his left, a tentacle wraps around Allison’s mouth while two tackle Diego’s fists. ‘No, no, no, stop it!’ Ben screams at himself, but to no avail. 

And then there’s Vanya. Stood in front of him, Reginald’s rifle slung over her shoulder, the barrel pointing at Ben’s stomach. Vanya is trying to catch his eye but she can’t because they’re flickering frantically about the room.

“It’s okay,” she is whispering, over and over, hands and voice shaking with each jaunt of movement each syllable. “I’m not going to hurt you Ben, I promise. I’m- I’m- Ben, please, look at me. Please, I know you’re in there.” She’s desperate now, some part of Ben observes. The part that floats above his body, watching him lash out at his siblings.

Diego is a better shot, he’ll never miss, Sky-Ben shrewdly observes. Too bad he’s busy wresting against a tentacle protruding from Earth-Ben.

So, he guesses it’s his own fault that he’s stuck with Vanya, who’s a lousy shot and probably won’t even pull the trigger. Ben wishes he could urge her on, let her know that it doesn’t matter which part of her he hits: it’s all the monster now. 

But instead, a tentacle reaches towards Vanya, snaking its way towards her waist. And in flurry of noise and movement she squeezes her eyes shut and puts the tiniest amount of pressure on the trigger and-

Later, the coroner tells them that she barely even skimmed the heart. But it’s enough to make the tentacles retract, falling limply to the ground. It’s enough to make Ben fall back onto the ground with the softest of thuds as Luther races to catch him. It’s enough to make Vanya claw at her own skin, screaming again and again that she’s a murderer, that she didn’t mean to hurt him. It’s enough to make Allison whimper and run out the room. It’s enough to make Diego hold Klaus back as he tries to go to Ben, to help him.

It’s enough to kill Ben for the fifth time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry it's been so long!! Life got hectic and then I went on holiday and forgot my laptop like the idiot I am. Thank you for your patience, I hope you enjoy this chapter!!
> 
> Also this was really hard to write because I've been doing escapril so whilst my poetry brain is thriving, my prose brain is suffering big time.
> 
> Chapter title taken from Run by Stephen Fretwell.


	6. your death doesn't happen to you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It’s then, at the age of seventeen, that Ben dies for the sixth time. And this time, the universe does not reset itself."

The sixth time Ben dies, he stays dead.  
He finds it funny, really, that the death the universe decided on was probably the most mundane. The most boring, the quickest, the least painful. Well, the least painful for him. For his siblings, he’s not so sure.

Not that losing Ben this time is any different for them, not in the grand scheme of things. But it’s the first time the death sticks. It’s the first time Ben has to watch his family fall apart. That, he decides, is the worst thing about dying.

They’re seventeen, and Ben has finally been served with his own bout of puberty. He’s a foot taller, skinnier than ever, but with a voice that cracked sometime in late May. He’s no longer the baby, the little one, the kid brother. He convinced Diego to let them train together, and they do so every night in the courtyard. Ben pushes himself further and further each time, because with his new found height and voice, he’s also more determined than ever to not rely on his powers.

One day, he tells himself, he won’t use his powers at all. He can be a superhero without them, he doesn’t need tentacles to prove himself worthy of The Umbrella Academy. He can do it all by himself.

The days in the academy have begun to feel itchy- every one of his siblings checking for an escape route. Allison begs and begs their father to take her to acting classes, to let her audition for this movie or that one. Reginald refuses, tightens the security on the house, trying to knit the academy back together. They all know it’s only a matter of time before Allison gets her own way, she always does.

When he’s not training, Diego spends most of his days locked in his room, studying. The rest of the Hargreeves dismiss it as Diego being broody, but Ben knows, he knows, all about the police force. Diego confides in him, when they’re training, telling him that he’s gonna take it to the next level, protect the entire city not just stop a few bank robberies. Ben thinks he just wants the gun.

Luther seems to be the only one who’s not interested in life outside the academy. He loves the routine, the rigorous training, the high he feels after a mission. Ben thinks he’s addicted to their father’s approval; the way he laps it up. The way he crumples when he’s punished. He feels sorry for Luther the most.

Luther’s not the only one fighting his addiction. Klaus has given up any pretense of being sober and spends his days locked in his room, which seems more like a meth-lab. Ben gets it, he really does, he understands why Klaus does it. But he hates feeling his brother slip further and further away from him, become less Klaus. He starts to shut him out and Ben knows it’s because he can’t stand the judgment. His door is always closed, his window always open as an escape route. Once, Klaus misjudges which windows his and ends up climbing through Bens. Its four in the morning when he hears a gentle, apologetic rapping against the window. He struggles out of bed, rubbing at his eyes, and pulls at the stiff window lock.

Klaus climbs in, swinging both legs over and jumping down. The floorboards creak under the pressure. He’s grinning, but it’s the sort of grin that makes his face look like its cracking, splintering into fragment. In the dim light from the hallway, Ben can see his eyes are puffy and red- and it’s not just from weed, because his face is soaked and wet.

Ben cautiously takes a step forward, “Klaus, are you okay?” He reaches up a hand to wipe the tears away from his brothers face.

Klaus bats him away and hastily wipes at his own face, pushing past Ben and throwing himself down on his bed. “right as rain. Just a little chilly. And I got the window wrong, sorry about that, Ursula. You weren’t sleeping were you?”

Ben shakes his head. Klaus probably doesn’t even know what time it is, that everyone except doctors and junkies are asleep at four in the morning. 

Klaus nods, but not to him. He’s somewhere else, Ben observes, somewhere very far away. A part of Ben wishes he could go there too. He clambers on to the bed next to Klaus, who is still a head taller than him, and nestles under his arm. If he closes his eyes, he can pretend that they’re still Six and having a sleepover, that Diego is asleep at the foot of the bed and that Vanya is practising violin next door.

Vanya. She stopped coming home, even for holidays, electing to board at school instead. Ben thinks that the school must be like Hogwarts, if she would rather stay there then with her siblings. She’s the first of them to leave, in a way, although not officially. Reginald still pays her tuition and in the summer she’ll have to come home, but still. She’s left them in all but name. The Umbrella Academy has begun to crumble.

It’s then, at the age of seventeen, that Ben dies for the sixth time. And this time, the universe does not reset itself.

It starts as a normal day. He’s in the library, studying with Luther and Klaus. (studying is a lose term. Luther is practising push ups and pretending to read Jane Austin. Klaus is drawing dicks in Sylvia Plath. Ben is the only one actually studying.)

It is supposed to be a quiet day, but then the signal just above the door starts flashing red with urgency. Ben sighs and puts his book down, glancing at Luther who has already sprung up, ready as always. Klaus waves to them as they leave the library, “have a good battle my children! Be brave! Don’t get your uniforms dirty!”

As he’s getting changed into his uniform, Ben feels the tendril of a tentacle push at the skin around his stomach. He places his hands over there, trying to soothe the creature. It feels odd. There’s be no sign of danger, no anger, no immediate threat to life, so Ben has no idea why it chooses now to react. He zips up his suit and ignores it. It’s probably nerves, he tells himself.

The car ride there is the same as always. He’s packed in between Diego and Allison who seem to be squabbling over which mask is theirs. Ben doesn’t know why it matters. They’re all the same. 

The job is easy enough- infiltrate an art heist, save the masterpieces, apprehend the bad guys, talk to the press. Nothing they haven’t done before.

Allison goes in first, easily disguising herself among the fleeing museum-goers to get past the police barricades. Then, it’s Diego’s turn. He vaults the security banister and enters through the side door. Ben can tell by the screams and the sound of scraping that he’s done what he had to do.

Then, he enters with Luther. They use the main entrance, and split as soon as they enter. Luther heads for the west wind, where they know the thieves will cry and make a getaway. Which leaves Ben. He heads for the security vault. The rest of the thieves, who won’t have heard the commotion from the soundproof room will still be there, collecting the most valuable items. He ascends the stairs, heart pounding against his rib cage. The creature inside seems more turbulent than ever, and he doesn’t know how to calm. So instead, he wipes at the pool of sweat on his forehead and ups his marching rhythm. 

When he reaches the east wing, the area is deserted. The door to the vault is sat back on its hinges, like a cave or a gaping mouth, waiting for its food. Ben swallows. You can do this, he tells himself, you’ve done it a hundred times before. But somehow, the way everything around him quietens, and the way the creature tries to pull him back, pull him away from the vault, it all feels so different.

He steps inside, his footsteps reverberating on the metal floor. One man is in the process of taking cash from one of the drawers in the vault, his arms already full of looted artwork, each rolled up into neat bundles. When he sees Ben, fists clenched by his side he freezes.

“Put everything down, and come with me,” he tries to sound commanding but his voice wavers.

The man laughs, taking a step closer. “Or what? You gonna call your mommy?”

“I said,” Ben begins to repeat, gritting his teeth, “put it down.

All trace of humour fades from the thief's face and he growls, “and I said or what, bitch boy.”

Ben shakes his head and takes a step back. “I warned you. I gave you a chance. I’m sorry, but I did. And I’m so sorry for whats about to happen.”

He squeezes his eyes shut, lifting his fists, willing the monsters to come out, to help him. He feels the sensation of his stomach ripping in two and then the hint of a tentacle protruding through the skin, reaching out for the man in front of him when-

He never thought to check behind him. Never thought there could be two men in the vault. That one of them could be armed.

He hits the floor with a deafening sound, but there is no one there to hear it. The cold of the metal stings against the pool of blood rapidly forming around his broken form. His stomach, gaping open, the monster within rapidly retreating.

The feeling of lying there sends a bolt of nerves up his spine which his body answers with a spasm. He feels an aching sense of familiarity as the monster within him curls lifelessly around his broken arm. This has happened before. He's sure of it.

The memories aren’t clear at first, just whispers of the same thing. The hint of a long corridor, clutching onto Pogo’s hand. The smell of smoke, blocking out all his sense. The patter of feet as his siblings left the room. The feel of the bath water, mingled with blood and rapidly cooling. The sound of a chair falling. A gunshot.

It’s happened before. He’s died before, he’s sure of it. And if he’s died before, then he’s come back to life over and over again. He’ll come back to life again.

He’s not sure how long he’s unconscious for, but he knows it can’t be too long, because his siblings are going to realise he’s missing. They have to, they have to realise. So, he pulls himself up against a wall and waits for them.

Allison finds him first. He can hear her calling his name long before he can see her so he clambers to his feet and runs to tell her it’s okay, he’s okay, I keeps coming back to life Allie, I can’t die! He meets her on the east wing stairs, but she runs right past him and maybe she wasn’t really looking for him, she was checking on the thieves.

But she’s still shouting his name, so he follows her to the vault. Did she miss him? Was she so worried that she didn’t even think to look around her? Worry does weird things to people, Ben tells himself.

When he reaches he vault, Allison is crouched down and she’s sobbing into her hand. Ben frowns, stopping where he’s stood. Is she crying over one of the thieves? maybe she knew him. Ben tries to get close but then she screams, clinging onto the corpse in front of her. The corpse wearing and Umbrella Academy uniform…

Luther rushes past him. He must’ve heard Allison screaming. Ben step forward, towards his brother who is staring down at the ground shell shocked. “Luther, thank god,” Ben starts, but Luther doesn’t look at him. Instead, he wraps his arms around Allison and starts whispering in her ear, rocking her back and forth. 

“Luther?” Ben probes, stepping forward again. “Allison? What is going on? Why are you crying? Why won’t you answer me!”

And then, Diego runs right through him.

It feels like he’s glitching, at first. Like a simulation gone wrong. He takes a step back, tries to say something but his mouth won’t move. How did Diego do that? Maybe it’s some other power they didn’t know he had? It seems unlikely, Diego shows off about everything.

“Guys, is this a joke? Is it April fools? Because if so it’s very funny, but can you please stop now because-“ his voice cracks and he lets out a sort of sob “- because you’re really scaring me.”

They don’t answer. Allison cries and Luther stares and Diego batters the wall of the vault with his fists until they start to bleed.

“There’s nothing we can do, Allison,” Luther is the first one to speak. Allison just shakes her head.

“Yeah, like we don’t know that you sack of shit! You were supposed to watch him, weren’t you? East wing together, then west wing. Dad always says don’t go alone,” Diego sounds angry, but he’s crying and Ben is just confused. 

“Guys, please, what’s going on?” he pleads, but Luther talks over him, rendering his begging useless.

“Don’t pin this on me. He was probably trying out your vigilante crap that you were plying him with. That whole ‘be the bigger man’ bullshit. If he’d just used his power and not listened to your crap-”

“Shut up!” Allison screams, pulling away from Luther and tugging at her hair. “please shut up! Unless one of you knows how to bring him back just shut up!”

And then she runs out crying. Runs straight through Ben. 

That’s when he sees his own cold dead eyes staring up at him from the ground.

He turns to Diego, frantically shaking his head. “No, don’t worry, I’ll come back! I always come back! I died in that fire when we were eight and I’m still here! Diego, please, tell them I’m coming back! I always come back!”

But he might as well scream into the void, for all the good it would do him right now. Diego doesn’t hear him, just turns and leaves the vault. Leaving both Bens behind.

 

It takes him a few days of sitting there, hugging his knees in the corner of the vault, to realise that this time he isn’t coming back. The police come to inspect the crime scene and photographers take pictures of his body and then they take him to the morgue. He follows his body there. It’s not like he’s got anything else to do. He’s certainly not ready to go back to the academy yet. He can’t stand to see his siblings like that. If he weren’t already dead, seeing Allison that broken would kill him, it really would.

Once they start the autopsy on his body, he decides to leave. He can’t stand to watch his dead-self become a freak show, a spectacle. So instead, he wanders around the city- goes to the movies, sits in art exhibits, follows people home just to live life through their eyes. Really, it’s the loneliest he’s ever been.

The memories went from blurry to black and white and now they sit in his mind in technicolour. When he gets low, he just reaches into each different universe and plays with the memory. He remembers carving the tree with Klaus, and chores with Luther.

Really, he thinks about Vanya a lot. He looks at all the different memories of the two of them. He tries to stay away from the ones that hurt too much, like his fifth death. But on some particularly sadistic days, he likes to linger on it. It’s good to feel something again.

The day he returns home happens to be the day of the funeral. Funny, how things like that always seem to happen to him. He can look at the funny now, now that he’s dead. The funny can’t hurt him anymore.

The house is still when he returns. He thought his death would unite his siblings, but it seems to have done nothing but unpick the final stitches and set them adrift. He finds Allison first, packing up her belongings into neat cardboard boxes. Ben is happy for her, guesses she’s finally going to the auditions that she wants to go to. He wishes he could hug her and say well done, well done for doing what you want to do. 

Diego is in the courtyard. He’s hurling vases at the target opposite. He’s dressed in funeral attire but with each hit he’s grinning. It’s an odd contrast, and Ben thinks it’s the most Diego thing he’s ever seen.

Luther is sat at the kitchen table when Ben finds him. He sits with him for a while as Luther cries and cries and Ben wishes he could tell him that it’s not his fault. It’s just the way things are sometimes.

He stops at Fives portrait. He’d understand how Ben's feeling right now. How it feels to be separated from everyone you love. He wishes he could ask him how to handle it all.

Vanya is the hardest. Ben finds her in his room, curled up in his bed. She’s staring at the wall blankly, and her eyes are rimmed with red, like she’s been crying for hours. Food trays sit uneaten by the door, and every so often she sniffles, letting the world know she’s still there. Just. Ben can’t stay in that room too long, can’t stand seeing her like that. 

“I’ll come back, Vanya,” he whispers to her, and to no one. “I just can’t be here right now.” 

He knows he has to get out, leave the house before it consumes him. He makes a beeline for the stairs when he sees Klaus, climbing towards him. He goes to brush past, to get out, to run far far away when a small, nervous voice chokes out.

And Klaus just says, “Ben?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all induldging my angsty fic and for all your lovely comments and kudos!! It's been really fun to get back into writing, especially with this show and this character who I love so much!! Expect more tua fics from me, and especially more Ben because I love him!!
> 
> Chapter title taken from I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) by The 1975

**Author's Note:**

> oof!! that was fun but hard to write!! I haven't written that much in so long, my writers brain is a c h i n g. Just to clear a few things up;  
> 1) The universe resets to October 1st, 1989 every time Ben dies. Why? So I can keep writing horrible death scenes, of course. But also because the universe is trying to get him to his actual death date, and he just seems to keep dying on the way.  
> 2) I based this on what I thought would happen the first time Ben used his powers, seen as they are very gruesome and could very easily tear apart a five year old.  
> 3) as Ben gets older he probably will grow closer to his siblings. He's just very young and very scared and the rest of the umbrella academy are loud.  
> 4) I know everyone loves Ben and Klaus but I wanted to throw a different angle in there- namely that Ben doesn't enjoy Klaus' company too much to begin with. He's very loud and Ben is very quiet. But I hope I got across the fact that Ben doesn't hate Klaus, he just doesn't revel being around someone so loud when he's so timid and quiet. Also it gave me more time to focus on Vanya and Ben, which is a friendship I love.  
> 5) thank you for taking the time to read this!! I have another five chapters I want to post because I love writing these characters so much and I really appreciate people reading my fic which is just a drop in a crazy talented ocean.


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